Simple Sci-Fi Ship-to-Ship Combat

As I mentioned yesterday, I am in the midst of type-setting my SF + SWL Mash-Up and I am not sure I will have enough room for Ship-to-Ship combat (since that isn't a primary focus of the game). I did, however, come up with a simple (if extremely abstract) combat system and I want to at least post on the blog. Please note: I am operating under the assumption that space ships are extremely valuable, so combat between ship is designed to disable and board, not destroy a ship.

At the beginning of each round of combat, both sides choose to either Engage or Evade.

• If both Evade, the combat is over and both sides escape.
• When one Evades and the other Engages: if both sides succeed or fail with their roll, combat continues; if Evasion succeeds and Engagement fails, the combat is over, the Evaders escape; if Engagement succeeds and Evasion fails roll d6 for damage (see below)
• If both Engage, on any success, roll a d6 for damage:

1. Outmaneuvered! Attacker may successfully Evade or add +2 to next roll.
2. Minor Damage! Target ship is at -1 on all rolls until fixed.
3. Dangerous Leak! All crew members of target ship are at -2 until the leak is fixed.
4. Shields Down! Target ship is at -2 on all rolls until fixed.
5. Prepare to be boarded! Target ship’s Engine is dead until fixed and attacking crew may board.
6. Crash Landing! Target ship is near totaled and stranded on nearest planet/large space object.

As you can see, there are only three real possibilities with this system: escape, the ship is boarded or the ship crash-lands. Thus, regardless of which of these three events occur, the situation the players find their characters in can be affected by their choices and actions. If a TPK occurs, it doesn't happen because one player made a bad roll and the ship gets destroyed with everybody on it.

Meditating on Grappling (5e + B/X)

Over at B/X Blackrazor, JB ran an adventure for his kids and shared a little house rule he uses with multiple attacks:

My (simple) house rule gives creatures with multiple attacks one attack roll per round versus a maximum number of opponents equal to its multiple attacks...so the [carrion] crawler (for example) would be able to attack up to eight opponents, but regardless it would make only one attack per character per round. This is something I've been doing for a while now, and I find it works well in practice

This got me thinking about how I might express this idea in context of the Advantage/Disadvantage system from 5e (because I really want to see how many applications this mechanic can have). My starting point is an old-standby in the OSR and was even codified in S&W Complete:

Just as shields improve armor class by 1, fighting two-handed grants a +1 to damage rolls . . . and fighting with a weapon in each hand gives a +1 to hit. (Note that fighting with two weapons does not actually give two separate attacks; it just increases the likelihood of landing a successful blow.)

So, multiple attacks don’t result in extra die-rolls, but rather in a bonus to-hit. Why not give advantage instead? Thus, the carrion crawler in JB’s example would get one attack, but would roll two dice and use the higher of the two.

Since we are already going down this rabbit hole, shield-fighting should do the opposite. Rather than affecting AC, having a shield puts attackers at a disadvantage, meaning that they would roll two dice and take the lower of the two results. This advantage would be cancelled out by either multiple attacks or flanking.

Two-handed weapons, therefore, should have advantage on damage rolls.

This all leads to grappling, the bane of every D&D combat ruleset. The reason for this is rather simple: combat in D&D is very abstract, which is why multiple attacks can equal a bonus to-hit (two-weapon wielding in S&W) or an advantage as in my musings above. Grappling, by its very nature is . . . not. Thus, once anyone tries to go down the road of specificity and handle grappling it gets messy.

The above concepts for using advantage/disadvantage suggest a nice and simple abstraction for grappling:

Anyone can grapple. A successful attack roll indicates that grappling is taking place and both the attacker and target are now at a disadvantage. Thus, anyone attacking those currently grappling gets to roll two dice and chose the higher of the two and those grappling must now roll two dice and take the lower of the two if they wish to make an attack. This can only work on creatures that are larger than the attacker at the Referee’s discretion.

This rule could also work for shield bashing, possibly even cancelling out the disadvantage the attacker gets for grappling because of the shield (though they would lose the defensive capabilities of the shield).

I am currently play testing these ideas with a summer-time  campaign with my kids. The first time it came into play was an encounter with a ghoul. Having shields made the encounter survivable and hammered the point that attacking with advantage and a paralyzing touch is just as nasty as three attacks per round with a paralyzing touch.

Holmes on Abstract Melee vs. Concrete Missile Combat

It is an old school trope that combat is abstract and that each “to hit” roll is actually a “to damage” roll representing several attempted strikes over the course of a one minute combat round. This understanding of combat, however, breaks down with the introduction of missile fire, where the use of ammunition necessitates the understanding that each die roll represents a single shot. Thus, the game has moved toward applying the same understanding to melee. One of the first to do this was Dr. Holmes:

In a melee the attacker strikes a blow or "takes a swing."
...
Melee is the most exciting part of the game, but it must be imagined as if it were occuring in slow motion so that the effect of each blow can be worked out.

Recently there have been a couple of attempts (Brenden at Untimately and Talysman at 9 and 30 Kingdoms) at reversing this trend by abstracting missile combat. As much as I like both of these (especially Brenden’s), they both break down once thrown weapons enter the picture (as Brenden himself acknowledges).

This suggests that missile combat was never meant to be abstracted, but rather a separate subsystem of combat. I say this because of the aforementioned Dr. Holmes. Despite his contribution to the modern conception of D&D combat, if one understands his work to be an edit of OD&D, he can shed light on a way for old-schoolers to have their cake and eat it too:

Once the party is engaged in melee, arrows can not be fired into the fight because of the probability of hitting friendly characters.

If one follows Holmes on this score, than melee combat is clearly differentiated from missile combat — they happen in different phases of the game and can therefore be handled differently. Melee can be abstract while missile combat represents individual shots.

The key to this is a proper understanding of movement, because there is a danger of completely eliminating missile combat from most encounters if opposing sides can close into melee before any shots are made. Here is movement according to OD&D:

Movement … is in segments of approximately ten minutes. Thus it takes ten minutes to move about two moves — 120 feet for a fully armored character. Two moves constitute a turn, except in flight/pursuit situations where the moves/turn will be doubled.
...
Melee is fast and furious. There are ten rounds of combat per turn.

Encounter distance in a dungeon is from 20-80 feet. Therefore, it would be possible for the side who wins initiative to close into melee and prevent missile fire altogether; however, take a look at how Holmes handles movement:

There are ten "rounds" of combat per turn. Each round is ten seconds, so a combat turn is shorter than a regular turn, but results in at least as much muscular fatigue. Movement (if any) is usually at a sprint; an unarmored man can move 20 feet per melee round, a fully armored man only 10 feet.

Note that if one ignores the fact that Holmes has shortened the combat round from one minute to 10 seconds, his combat movement is approximately 1/10 that of normal movement (for a more detailed examination of movement in Holmes, see my post here). In other words, rather than having a full move every round, a character or monster still has a full move over the course of a turn.

The upside of this understanding of movement is that in a typical encounter, the process of closing into melee (and thus ending the missile portion of combat) will usually take a number of rounds. Thus, the process of getting into melee is full of interesting tactical choices.

For those of you who have grown up with the notion that their character can fire into a melee, the subsystems are actually not as incompatible as one might expect. As Holmes suggests, firing into melee is fraught with danger — there is a very real possibility of friendly fire (my take on how to do this with Holmes is here and here). Thus, rather than letting loose as many arrows as possible into the fight, an archer would most likely be waiting until there is a safe opening through which to fire. Thus, in the abstraction of melee combat, someone who is firing into that melee is going to only have one clear shot every minute or so — which translates into one missile per round.

Holmes & Cook: Dungeon Design

I have been busying myself with the prospect of creating a dungeon in homage to the Chateau des Faussesflammes, one of the ruined castles mentioned by CAS in his stories of Averoigne. Being in a Holmesian kind of mood, I have been trying to tackle this particular project by reverse engineering the Sample Dungeon in the Holmes Edition. In some of my initial forays into the project, I have found an interesting curiosity.

As a life-long hobbyist, I cannot remember a time more exciting than the period we are living through right now. We have a plethora of resources at our finger tips that demonstrate an amazing amount of creative output. Being a bit of a map-geek, one such resource that I have taken particular joy in is the rebirth of the geomorph. I was fully planning on taking advantage of this revival for the purposes of creating maps for my version of the Chateau; however, go on over to Dave's Mapper and compare the (marvelous) results that you get there with the Sample Dungeon from Holmes:

The average room size in the Sample Dungeon is 60 x 60, which easily takes up more than half the space on the popular 100 x 100 geomorph used by the good folks who draw them for Dave's Mapper. The largest rooms in the Sample Dungeon wouldn't even fit on a single geomorph. Even more interesting is that the Keyed rooms are on average almost twice as big as the Empty (E) rooms (75 x 65 compared to 35 x 35).

This got me thinking about the necessity of designing a dungeon with such large rooms and, in particular, encounter areas. I think this largely has to do with the way combat works in Holmes. Missile (and Magic) combat is largely distinct from Melee combat. Once Melee combat is engaged, Missile (and Magic) combat effectively ends, due to the fact that missile fire and spells have a chance of hitting the wrong target.

Given this style of combat, movement and closing into melee and/or maneuvering to avoid melee becomes a vital element of the game. If combat were confined to small spaces (such as the majority of the rooms found in 100 x 100 geomorphs) this ability to move would be severely limited. Most combats would engage in melee almost immediately, reducing the usefulness and effectiveness of characters interested in using bows and spells. Therefore, Holmes provides encounter areas with plenty of room to maneuver.

Besides offering more evidence that the Dungeon is an ever-changing underground spawning new rooms, passageways and even monsters, the size of Empty rooms also implies an attempt by Holmes to make them dangerous.

The only monsters a party of adventurers would encounter in an Empty room are Wondering Monsters, which are meant to be a major part of the Holmesian dungeon-delving experience. Outside of evidence of an ever-changing semi-intelligent dungeon, they seem rather innocuous. Their significantly smaller size, however, limits any combat that does happen within them. Like the rooms on a typical 100 x 100 geomorph, the smaller Empty rooms limit tactical choice in combat. They are therefore a more dangerous place to encounter wandering monsters than a normal encounter area.

The long and the short — I (unfortunately) won't be using geomorphs to do my version of the Chateau des Fammesflammes because Holmesian dungeons need significantly larger rooms than we modern gamers are used to. I shall also be endeavoring to have my dungeon create a sense of claustrophobia with players despite these larger room sizes. Hopefully, they will come to fear the smaller Empty rooms, where wandering monster encounters are truly dangerous.

Holmes & Cook: Shield and Shields

I have been running some hypothetical combats using the Holmes rules as I have come to understand them in order to see how it feels. One of the things that had become immanently clear is that a central factor in combat is closing into melee. Those that do not have missile capability will want to close as soon as possible. Those that have good missile capability will want to prolong missile combat for as long as possible.

The reason: missile combat is deadly — as it should be — and missile combat effectively ends once melee begins. This reality, however, brings up a bit of a surprise. The most vulnerable characters to missile combat are the ones who normally can only really function effectively during missile combat — magic-users.

When understanding normal missile fire as volleys, targets are determined randomly. This means that magic-users have an equal chance of being targeted as anyone else. They can't hide behind the fighting-men. If they are targeted, chances are they are not only going to be hit, but killed. Ironically, in order to use their spells (especially combat spells) they need to be in missile combat. Once melee begins, they cannot throw around spells without risking the chance of affecting the wrong target.

This reality results in Shield being one of, if not the, most useful spell in a magic-user's arsenal. It also explains why it is more effective against missiles than it is against melee attacks:

By means of this spell the user imposes a self moving magical barrier between himself and his enemies. It provides the equivalent of plate armor and shield (armor class 2) against missiles, chain mail and shield (armor class 4) against other attacks.

Due to the fact that this indispensable spell has only a duration of 2 turns, I foresee a couple of outcomes:

1. Players will get frustrated at the casualty rate of magic-users. Combat encourages them to engage opponents when they are most vulnerable. That is not a good combination.
2. Most, if not all, magic-users in the game will be elves, because of their ability to wear armor and thus actually have a chance to shine as a spell caster.

Given the recent meme about shields and how they ought to do more than reduce AC by one, I have a simple solution to the dilemma of the magic-user in Holmes:

If a character is armed with a shield, they can voluntarily become the target of a volley shot against an adjacent character.

This gives the party the option to hide the magic-user behind a big, heavily armored fighting-man during missile combat. One interesting outcome I foresee with this: magic-users (unless they can afford to have a whole bunch of Shield scrolls) better play nice with the fighting-men…

Holmes & Cook: Combat

The more time I spend with Dr. Holmes and his Basic Edition, the more fascinated I become and, frankly, more surprised. I find that I am having to leave my own preconceived notions and prejudices at the door, because Holmes is constantly challenging them. This is no less true of the way he seems to envision combat.

As a point of departure, let us look at the Combat Sequence as it is found in Cook:

Each side rolls initiative (1d6)
The side with initiative acts first:

1. Morale checks, if necessary
2. Movement
3. Missile fire combat
4. Magic Spells
5. Melee combat

Each remaining side them completes the above actions in order.

Initiative

In Holmes, combat initiative is determined individually by Dexterity. Where Dexterity scores are relatively similar (within 1 or 2 points) a d6 is rolled to see who goes first. Dexterity of monsters is rolled on the spot. This order is static.

Interestingly, this style of initiative actually plays very nicely into the Variable Weapon Damage table I came up with by melding concepts from both Holmes and Cook. Characters with low Dexterity are incentivized to use bigger, slower weapons. If they are going to be going last in combat anyway (due to a low Dex), why not go with the slower weapons and do more damage? It also makes pole-arms (which automatically win initiative on round one) very valuable.

Morale

Though morale is mentioned by Holmes, there is no codified rules for them. He mentions henchmen loyalty in his explanation of Charisma. He also mentions in his description of Hobgoblins that they have a +1 to their morale. Interestingly, he equates this with a saving throw vs. fear. Does this mean Charisma measures some kind of magical aura that inspires people to loyalty or fear? It would be interesting to see what would happen if a morale check was actually a save vs. spell/death ray, etc. (Which one do you use?) I must admit, however, that having successfully used the morale rules from B/X for years (and given that they are very clearly laid out in Cook), I am very much inclined to use them rather than the nebulous saving throw that Holmes seems to suggest.

Movement

Holmes describes movement in a combat round this way:

Movement (if any) is usually at a sprint; an unarmored man can move 20 feet per melee round, a fully armored man only 10 feet.

This is radically different from the 60/90/120 feet implied in Cook (and what I am far more familiar with). The reason for this departure is that Holmes understands combat as a unique sub-system of time and movement:

There are ten "rounds" of combat per turn. Each round is ten seconds, so a combat turn is shorter than a regular turn

Indeed, rather than combat being an abstract representation of a flurry of blows, each round reflects single blows by each person participating in combat:

Melee is the most exciting part of the game, but it must be imagined as if it were occuring in slow motion so that the effect of each blow can be worked out.

Since combat is less abstract, movement and position become far more important. Indeed, Holmes suggests that

the Dungeon Master should be guided by the actual placement of the figures on a paper sketch or on the table in deciding how many opponents can engage as melee starts, always keeping in mind the dimensions of the dungeon itself.

Missile combat

This placement becomes critical when it comes to missile fire because Holmes limits the use of missile fire in a couple of significant ways. Firstly, he states:

unless in a very high roofed area, all slinging, as well as long range fire, is not possible.

Secondly, he states several times that missile fire is not possible once melee begins:

Once the party is engaged in melee, arrows can not be fired into the fight because of the probability of hitting friendly characters.

[When] melee is joined, after which no missile fire is permitted because of the danger of hitting friendly forces.

Remember that spells and missiles fired into a melee should be considered to strike members of one's own party as well as the enemy.

Two things, then, are going on. Firstly, movement is limited, not only because combat rounds are so short, but to allow for missile fire to be part of the game. Wandering monsters will represent a large number of combats, and these encounters happen at a distance. Since missile fire ends once the sides are engaged in melee, small movement rates necessitate tactics and resource management when closing with a group of wandering monsters.

Secondly, Holmes appears to envision missile fire in terms of volleys rather than in uber-accurate shots made by marksmen. When firing in a volley, archers aim in arcs — and this is especially true of slingers. This is how they get distance. Thus, when in a confined space, long range is not possible. Though Holmes does state that missile fire is not possible once melee is engaged, he does hint at the possibility — as long as you are willing to chance hitting your own party. This is exactly what would happen if a volley rained down on a melee.

In other words, combat according to Holmes is more war-game than RPG. Personally, I do not see that as a problem, given that Holmes still errs on the side of simplicity. However, it does bring with it an interesting pre-supposition.

Proficiency with a missile weapon does not equate to marksmanship. It means you are able to launch a missile at a general area, not necessarily a specific target. An interesting implication is that when firing at a group, targets ought to be determined randomly. This is an easy way to simulate the possibility of hitting your own party members when in melee.

Given that Holmes leaves the door open to both firing into melee (risking damage to your own) and to classes far beyond the four archetypes, here we see the suggestive shape of a marksman-type character. Since he mentions the ranger sub-class, it follows that by limiting weapon & armor choice, the ranger could target specific opponents, choose to fire into melee without doing damage to his own party and have the ability to fire at long range indoors.

As an aside, I wouldn't so severely limit the sling. Having seen these things in use, I believe it would be possible to fire indoors at closer ranges.

Magic

Holmes allows spells to be cast prior to missile combat:

When there is time, or when a magic-user says he is getting a spell ready, magic spells go off first. This is followed by any missile fire…

I think this is fair. Note what Holmes says about casting spells while engaged in melee:

If he [the magic user] is personally attacked he can't concentrate to use his magic but must draw his dagger and defend his skin!

Thus, if spells came after missile fire, a spell caster might never be able to cast any spells (where getting hit by a missile interrupts the casting).

Interestingly, Holmes allows magic users to use magical staves and wands as melee weapons — despite the fact that, as far as normal weapons are concerned, they can only use daggers.

Magic does raise an interesting problem not addressed by Holmes. Since turns inside and outside of combat are radically different (100 seconds vs. 10 minutes), what relationship do they have to spell duration? Since Holmes describes combat turns as resulting "in at least as much muscular fatigue" I think that the answer to spell duration depends on when the spell is cast. If cast outside of combat, normal turns apply. Inside combat, combat turns apply. This should encourage planning ahead…

Melee

There are few interesting quirks here as well. Holmes allows for up to three abreast in a 10 ft. wide corridor:

One would not expect to get more than two or three figures fighting side by side in a ten foot corridor, for example.

Attacking from behind only garners a +2 to hit (but the target does not get to use a shield). There is also the ability to Parry. This has to be done prior to the attack. Doing so subtracts 2 from the attackers die; however, if the attack succeeds by rolling the exact target number, the parrying weapon breaks!

Finally, there is this juicy little blurb:

If an opposing figure is killed or withdraws, the attacker may advance or pursue immediately — if the player desires — or he may take some other action.

I am sorely tempted to interpret "some other action" to include another attack against someone in melee range. The question becomes, is this choice available to everyone, or just fighting men? Personally, I am leaning towards the latter.

All-in-all, I find myself truly intrigued by Holmesian combat and am itching to try it out…